Geography

The world's largest confirmed impact crater is buried under South African farmland

About 2 billion years ago, an asteroid roughly 20-25km wide struck what's now South Africa, gouging a crater originally about 250km across. Erosion has worn it down to a faint ring of hills near the town of Vredefort, but it's still Earth's largest verified impact structure. It's now a UNESCO World Heritage Site studied for clues about the planet's early history.

Natalie H. Allen, Miki Nakajima, Kai Wünnemann, Søren Helhoski, Dustin Trail, A Revision of the Formation Conditions of the Vredefort Crater — Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, vol. 127, 2022

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